Chase Sapphire Reserve – NEW Credit Card

Chase Sapphire Reserve – NEW Credit Card

There’s a new credit card in town, and it’s called the Chase Sapphire Reserve. Officially, it will be launched August 21, 2016, but yesterday…

Well, yesterday the card accidentally went live and eagle-eyed churners over at Reddit posted the link and begin to apply.

About 20 minutes after that, Chase shut down the link.

Why? Because it wasn’t ready. It was their beta landing/application page. The URL had “.wip” in it, which means “work in progress” – and once the page was shut down, if you refreshed, you were asked for developer credentials to log in and access the page.

Oops.

Though it’s a false start, there isn’t too much to be disappointed by. In fact, a few things were confirmed!

Card Benefits

Sign-up bonus: 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points

Spending requirement: $4,000 in three months

Annual fee: $450 and $75 for authorized users

Lounge access: Priority Pass

Travel credits: $300 per calendar year (so it resets after Dec. 31 each year, effectively giving you $600 in travel credits this year). These will function like Citi Prestige travel credits, but will also include hotels and car rentals – basically anything that codes as travel!

Bonus categories: 3X on Dining and Travel (whereas the Sapphire Preferred is 2X)

This card will also be issued as a Visa Infinite and have the usual suite of benefits like auto collision waiver insurance when renting a car.

That sign-up bonus is mouth watering, but so are the travel credits and the bonus categories.

5/24 Exempt?

For now.

Frequent Miller compiled some useful data from Reddit and found that 80% of applicants (who shared their stories, anyways) were over 5/24 and were approved. Apparently, when the Chase Freedom Ultimate launched, it too was exempt from 5/24, but only for the first few days.

So what should you do?

Here’s what I’m going to do, as my wife and I both have a lot of Chase products which significant credit limits.

Lower credit limits. We have sufficient credit with Chase and I’ve previously found that when I lose/remove $5,000 – 7,000 in available credit, we have easier times getting automatically approved.

Hold off on any other cards, including authorized users. Don’t give Chase less of a reason to approve you. Even with Citi’s new rules. You can apply for this on 8/21 and then a Citi card after that Chase application has gone in.

Unfreeze your Experian reports. I’ve kept my frozen for a better part of two years so that when I apply for Citi or Bank of America cards, those banks won’t pull Experian (which is dominated by AMEX and Chase in New York). Be sure to unfreeze your Experian (if Chase pulls that in your area) so you’re ready to go once the application is live. You can find out more information on freezes/thaws here.

Bottom line

Not only does this card have an incredible sign-up bonus, there are also some key benefits that make it worth keeping, even with the hefty annual fee. I really hope for all of us over 5 cards in 24 months that this card is exempt from the rule.

If the link actually goes live before August 21, I’ll be sure to post it.